Justin Moore's Top 5 games of 2013

Hey guys, I know this is kinda late but I just thought I should post somewhere what my favourite games of 2013 were. So here goes nothing

5.Fire Emblem: Awakening

Fire Emblem was never a franchise I had any interest in, it always looked just too complicated for me. After 2012 though my love for Xcom: Enemy Unknown has made my interest in turn based strategy games sky rocket. I was hungry for anything that had me strategically moving each of my units and thinking out every one of my moves.  So when I got a 3DS it was pretty obvious to me that this was a game I was going to get.

Fire Emblem is a ruthless game, in Xcom sure your units die and you had to replace them with more but it was never as brutal as it is in Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem gives each character dialogue with each other after battles, and even in battles your characters build relationships with each other to a point where they could even have children. So when one of them was killed it was really hard to not turn off my system and just restart the battle (which I did several times). You care about them because they care about each other. The story is good but it tends to be in the background compared to the actual combat and the relationships between characters.

I know this is gonna sound weird, but I was sometimes scared to continue playing. Each battle stressed me out that I would end up sitting for 20 minutes each time I had to make a move. That clearly shows that I am no Fire Emblem expert, but it was just something I had to do to make sure that I wasn’t getting everyone killed. After those 20 minute turns would end though and it turned out I had won the battle the feeling of joy and relief was intense and I think that's why I liked this game so much.

4.Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Now this is a game I didn't expect to like at all, the art style wasn't really to my liking and the controls looked clunky when I would watch my brother play. When I actually picked up the controller and started playing though it just made sense. Brothers is a dual joystick game in which you control one brother with the left stick and the other with the right stick.

I always seemed to have to have them on their corresponding sides of the screen just to make sure my brain wasn’t freaking out. I think the control scheme in this game is ingenious, they aren’t the tightest or smoothest but I think that the clunkyness serves a purpose. These kids are on a journey to save their father and they are all on their own. They are clearly venturing out into the great wide world for the first time and having to cooperate with each other. So when I would mix up the brothers and messed up the puzzle or something like that, it felt like it was contextual to the brothers like they were fighting or having a disagreement.

The story was kinda by the book, but just the way that I solved the last puzzle in the game was absolutely brilliant, combining the mechanics of the game with story itself was what made this game stand out to me as a top five game of the year. I think everyone should play brothers.

3. The Legend Of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Well I don’t really know what to say about Zelda other than they put a twist on my favourite Zelda game and they did a damn good job. Fuck this is a good game. I missed how good Zelda could be and this was just fabulous. PLAY ZELDA

2. Bioshock Infinite

Floating America, girl with special powers, vigors. This game was so damn good and I don’t care who disagrees. I loved every moment of it, the shooting the powers and especially the story. I have never ever seen the internet more a buzz about an ending of a game. Booker and Elizabeth took me on a journey through Columbia that I never wanted to end.

I feel like the setting of Columbia was the thing that made this game number two for me. The first time I came across the barber shop quartet singing God Only Knows gave me goose bumps, I wanted to know why and how these men on a floating city in 1912 were singing the beach boys. I wanted to know why Elizabeth could rips holes in space and time and I wanted to know what the fuck happened to Booker.

The combat was also really fun for me, the combinations that I could pull off with the vigors and the guns were just amazing. I found the combat arenas did differ from section to section and Elizabeth handing me health potions and ammo was just super convenient. The combat wasn’t the reason this game was so high for me, it was the story but good combat never hurts.

1. Gone Home

This game is beautiful. It is absolutely touching and magical. Sam’s (your sister in the game) journal entries that you find around the house are basically the only interactive things in the game besides a bunch of notes that you can find. These audio diaries though were so powerful that every time one came upon one I would stop and just listen to what she had to tell me. The notes I would find around the house would give me context to what had been happening around the house while my character (Katie) was away in Europe.

I don’t want to spoil too much about this game because I don’t think that would be fair for the people who have yet to experience it. This game just gave me something that I had never experienced in a game before and I value that, it’s what I look forward to from games is for them to surprise me. To give me experiences that I want to tell people about to have them experience too. So please, go buy Gone Home and play it.

-Justin Moore